In The Nanny Diaries two former nannies, Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin, have written a scathing attack on their chosen profession and those who employ them. Our heroine, twenty-one year old Nan, has been hired to look after the four year old son, Grayer, of a wealthy, successful couple, the Xes. The position is attractive, it fits in with her final year of college and she likes the child. The parents turn out to be dictatorial, increasing Nan’s responsibilities from part time child care to single handedly raising their child and running their personal errands. Blind to the needs of the young boy, the parents indulge in affairs and preoccupy themselves with work (Mr. X) or are simply negligent, refusing to accept the responsibilities of motherhood in favour of facials and shopping (Mrs. X). Nan attempts to balance her demanding workload with her personal life, including her eccentric (but comparably stable) family members and her romantic pursuit of the boy from upstairs burdened with the embarrassing moniker of Harvard Hottie.

At first Mrs. X’s demands are amusing, a little kooky, but quickly descend into madness. The excessive demands and lack of responsibility through Nan’s eyes, although written in a light tone, become really frustrating. Nan doesn’t want to leave because she doesn’t want to leave Grayer, who she has formed a real bond with, in the unloving family situation. After an unforgivably horrible holiday experience she does eventually leave, venting her frustrations to a secret nanny-cam Mrs. X has installed. She records over her initial vehement rant to leave a more careful message for the parents – doing this, while understandable, leaves a lot of necessary things unsaid. In all likelihood Mrs. X is going to treat the next nanny the same, and the next, and the next, and in doing so condemning Grayer to an unstable foundation. While Nanny is freed from the tyrannical reign of Mrs. X, what becomes of Grayer? A succession of nannies who leave without notice, a mother who refuses to take responsibility for him, a father who is emotionally and physically absent?

The story does leave a slightly bad taste, but for the most part it is a warm and amusing tale about the bonds between carer and child, however temporary. One just hopes that Grayer doesn’t turn out like those other Upper East Side children I’ve been reading about.

Rather than attempting to escape the “oh my god working retail in December” frazzle through literature, I instead seem to be gravitating toward novels about women working in stores. First, Shopgirl, and now Madeleine St John’s The Women in Black. Fittingly, this novel is set in the weeks before Christmas in an upmarket department store, F.G. Goodes, in 1950s Sydney.

‘It is very beautiful here,’ said Magda to Stefan as the sun went down, ‘it really is.’
‘Are you happy?’ he asked her.
‘Of course not!’ said Magda. ‘What a very vulgar suggestion. Are you?’
‘Oh dear, I hope not,’ said Stefan.

Lesley Miles is a quiet schoolgirl who has just completed her high school Leaving Certificate, she takes a temporary job at Goodes in the Ladies’ Cocktail Frocks department while anxiously awaiting her results. Patty Williams is in an unhappy marriage with a drunk, Fay Baines is single and not happy about it. Magda is the head of the elite Model Gowns department who takes Lesley under her wing. The Women in Black manages to tease out the drama and tension in the everyday circumstances of the four sales assistants, without resorting to histrionics. There is a quiet tenderness and understanding at play in the interactions between the women and the people in their lives. A deceptively light read with moments of glittering humour and insight, and most importantly, real heart at its core.

The final loot of 2009!

• Execution: The Guillotine, the Pendulum, the Thousand Cuts, the Spanish Donkey and 66 Other Ways of Putting Someone to Death by Geoffrey Abbott
• Court Lady and Country Wife: Two Noble Sisters in Seventeenth Century England by Lita-Rose Betcherman
• Insatiable: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream by Jason Fagone
• Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son by Allen and Louis Ginsberg
• Timothy Leary: A Biography by Robert Greenfield
• The Adventures of Tintin: Cigars of the Pharaoh by Hergé
• The Adventures of Tintin: In the Land of the Soviets by Hergé
• The Collected Stories by Katherine Mansfield
• Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France by Lucy Moore
• Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs edited by John Pilger
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
• The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age 1945-2000 by Martin Torgoff

The best Christmas gift of all is the hugely comfortable, Grimace coloured bean bag in which I plan to do much reading over the years. Or recovering from intense family dance offs on the Wii, I’m pretty sure we worked off more than what we ate for Christmas dinner! You ain’t seen nothing until you’ve seen me shake my ass to ‘Groove is in the Heart‘. Don’t worry, the youtube video is just the music video, I’m not trying to inflict my dance moves to an international audience.

Wait, Grimace is supposed to be an anthropomorphic tastebud? I always just assumed he was some sort of giant purple monster. Childhood under capitalism is so disturbing, no wonder so many of us are dysfunctional.

Inaki Escudero read 52 books in 52 weeks this year. It is that time of year where we should consider our reading goals and challenges. If you are so inclined, what goals are you thinking about setting for yourself for 2010?

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

After her husband is pronounced dead, the social worker assigned to Joan Didion reassures the doctor that she is “a real cool customer.” This coolness translates into her recollection and attempt to understand her loss, which sadly prevents the reader from forming any lasting emotional connection to her story. After their daughters hospitalization with pneumonia, Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne return home and prepare for dinner. Mid-conversation, Dunne suffers a fatal cardiac arrest. The Year of Magical Thinking is written in the year after his death, and follows Didion’s grieving process while her daughter is readmitted to hospital after collapsing.

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.

Didion attempts to understand her emotional reaction to her husbands death, an intensely personal and painful process. Throughout, however, she remains objectively detached, even in her description of her most intimate thoughts, fears and revelations. She remembers times spent together with Dunne, what that meant then and now, things that were said, the meaning of which have changed for her. At times Didion’s journalistic instincts take over the emotional impulse, she researches the psychological effects of grief, she buys impenetrable textbooks on neuroanatomy to try better understand her daughter’s condition. Information, she claims, is the key to control. She is continually seeking official documentation, learning the medical jargon to be able to locate some rational sense in her loss.

For a memoir which focuses solely on loss, death and mourning, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is life affirming, but distanced. At the same time, I think my failure to really deeply connect with this is due to my not having experienced such a profound loss. I enjoyed Didion’s map of human consciousness, the bizarre and seemingly irrational paths our minds take, and her honesty about her relationship.

“Sometimes a critic’s aesthetic judgment is impossible to extricate from what you might call her cinematic libido. There are movies that bring us a pleasure that’s neither definable nor defensible. These used to be called “guilty pleasures,” but that phrase seems too judgmental, too pre-Vatican II, for our postmodern era of omnivorous cultural consumption. The distinction between high and low culture, between what we’re allowed to enjoy publicly and what we must sneak off to savor in private, has effaced itself to the degree that “guilty pleasures” needs to be replaced by a more morally neutral term. For our purposes here, I’ll go with a term that a friend and I coined in college and that I still deploy on occasion: movies we couldn’t intellectually defend but still unapologetically loved we called “juicebombs.”"

In her recent review of The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Slate’s film reviewer Dana Stevens faces a conundrum which I found myself confronted with while I read, and wanted to read, the first book in the Gossip Girl series by Cecily von Ziegesar. “I don’t believe in guilty pleasures” I always asserted, I believed in unashamed, unabashed pleasure in anything I enjoyed. Whether it be an apparently crappy movie – Showgirls was a favourite for a very, very long time – or television show, or music, if I liked it and was entertained by it, then it was worthy of my attention. I never looked at things in terms of “taste” or kitsch value, value was determined by my personal relationship with it. So, why was I so embarrassed to buy (yes, really) and read these novels? Why did I seek reassurance that I wasn’t committing some booknerd crime? Why did I consider excuses and alternate reasons for my purchase choice?

Because, Gossip Girl is, as Stevens would call it, a juicebomb of a novel. I cannot defend it. I cannot claim any intellectual or moral value of the novel; the writing isn’t great, the characters are ridiculous and their trials and tribulations are completely alien to me. The novel is populated with rich, spoiled brat 17 year old characters who act like middle aged women, are preoccupied with labels and social standing and who speak in the flattest dialogue I have ever read.

Serena van der Woodsen returns to her privileged Upper East Side social set after a stint in boarding school, only to find herself shunned and plagued by rumours from her form circle of friends. With their social movements charted by the anonymous blogger known only as Gossip Girl – a narrative choice that functions only as a gimmick, it offers no real perspective or comment on the happenings, maybe I expect too much – the group of teenagers tread the ground of adolescence with the hyper-awareness of public scrutiny. Blair Waldorf, Serena’s former best friend, is horrified by her return because she believes she will be relegated to second best in favour of the “perfect” Serena. Blair’s boyfriend, Nate Archibald, has a long standing attraction to Serena, a relationship consummated without Blair’s knowledge. The plot is substandard fare, the usual soap operatic tropes. Yet, for some reason I am still unable to define, it is compulsively readable and I am determined not to feel guilty about it.

[photo credit: shelbychicago at flickr]

I bought a whole heap of books this week. Stacks. The injuries acquired lugging them home will possibly require chiropractic care. With my bookstore closing and everything heavily discounted, plus staff discount, the accumulated loot only cost me about $3 a book, but I feel awkward and a little embarrassed displaying them here. (Not just because I may have bought some Gossip Girl books.) Instead of talking about the books I bought, this week, I’m going to gift you all with a number of links to some equally fascinating reading.

Jeanette Winterson reviews The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar at the New York Times. Highsmith is someone I have found myself increasingly drawn to, mainly due to her incredibly colourful personal history. I’m yet to read any of Highsmith’s fiction, but I imagine I will in the future, as well as a number of the biographies written about her. Winterson touches upon some of the intriguing aspects of Patricia Highsmith’s life in her review, so it is worth reading.

“Highsmith had a kind of archive-­attachment disorder; she adored lists. She chronicled, mapped, numbered and cross-referenced everything in her life, and even rated her lovers, but she wiped out what didn’t suit her and only vaguely acknowledged, when pressed by the more ferrety kind of interviewer, having conjured up a few story lines for Superman and Batman.”

Robert McCrum was invited to take a look at the Bodleian library collection of Kafka manuscripts – “What possible significance could a few boxes of manuscript have in the digital age? I was dead wrong.” – leading him to consider the many issues raised regarding the digitization of literature in general.

Margo Rabb surveys independent bookstores to find out which title is most often stolen from their stores. The answers and stories may surprise you.

“But this doesn’t mean that every reader is contributing to the bottom line. Only 40 percent of books that are read are paid for, and only 28 percent are purchased new, said Peter Hildick-Smith of the Codex Group, a consultant to the publishing industry. The rest are shared, borrowed, given away — or stolen.”

A bit of a David Foster Wallace love-fest in the online literary world this week with “All That“, an excerpt from his unfinished novel The Pale King to be released in 2010, published this week in the New Yorker.  GQ published an interview with Deborah Treisman, Wallace’s editor, discussing The Pale King and her working relationship with DFW.

Lauren Leto has written a funny-because-it-is-(mostly)-true list of how to stereotype readers by their favourite authors.You will laugh and nod and say “oh my God, I know someone just like that!” to at least one of her stinging barbs.

And, finally, in I could have told you this but I don’t have the science degree and research funding to back it up, whiskey hangovers are officially worse than vodka hangovers. Consider this your friendly festive and completely scientific warning to take it easy on the booze over the Christmas period.

I zipped through Steve Martin’s – yes, that very same Steve Martin you’re thinking of – novella Shopgirl over the quiet afternoons of a weekend in December. A melancholic story set in Los Angeles of a lonely shopgirl in her late twenties, Mirabelle, and the two men who enter her life as romantic partners; Ray Porter, an older millionaire, and Jeremy, a younger slacker. Mirabelle works the glove counter at department store Neiman Marcus, and spends her evenings alone, chatting to her two cats and working on her art. Martin manages to capture the absolute tedium that often comes with working in retail. The style of third person omniscient narration used here can come across as condescendingly smug and often that creeps into Martin’s technique. For the most part, however, through his sparse writing, lack of significant dialogue and focus on the contradictions of internal thought processes Martin creates realistically flawed characters.

Weeks later, Mirabelle doesn’t know if she is feeling better naturally or because the Celexa is working. It feels like a natural lift, and she wonders if she needs the pills at all. But she isn’t stupid, and she recalls hearing that this is a common feeling, so she keeps taking the pills daily.

Mirabelle’s attempts to cope with her initial emotional isolation and her repeated bouts of significant depressive episodes are never overly exaggerated or stylized. Abstaining from the usual wailing histrionics in the description of Mirabelle’s depression elicits as much sympathy for her plight. These characters make mistakes, are ignorant to the motivations of others and yet not condemned for it. Such errors and flaws, and the subsequent lessons learned, give the characters more complexity than the slight narrative should allow. An unexpectedly affecting novella.

• Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
• A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
• A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
• Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
• The Day of the Locust and The Dream Life of Balso Snell by Nathanael West

Welcome to the Penguin parade. Some of the more eagle eyed among you may have noticed that a lot of the books I have been buying as of late are from the Modern Library 100 Best Novels list, which I think will be featuring heavily in my reading in the new year. Not entirely sure how I am going to approach that one, but hopefully it will expose me to a number of authors and writing styles I’ve previously been too intimidated to try.

As we hurtle toward the end of this decade, every media outlet in the world is attempting to pinpoint the defining moments, events, cultural and consumer products, celebrities, etc., of the past ten years. Though I understand that such lists and articles are always subjective and written in order to be contentious and to foster discussion, I feel that they don’t always adequately capture the increasing disorder and complexity of the milieu. We still haven’t decided on what the last decade was called – the noughties, aughts, whatever – let alone to be able to describe the lasting cultural impact it will have. The increasing amount of choice in regards to what we read, watch or listen to, to how we inform ourselves via aggregated feeds, the proliferation of distinct niches means that the idea of cultural zeitgeist is almost obsolete. So, what better way to round out the decade with Joan Didion’s eloquent record of her own confusion over the meaning of the 1960s in The White Album.

Written in the late 1960s and early to mid 1970s, Didion reflects upon an American culture in turmoil, its understanding of itself torn apart by an unpopular war, mass murders, social discord, and a culture in upheaval. Though Didion herself manages to maintain her productivity, she is unable to reconcile this personal cohesion with the disruption of the era. This collection is strongest as Didion explores the complicated narratives of the time, the Manson murders, the civil rights movement and the music of the age.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. […] We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Didion also takes the time to investigate lesser known yet equally important aspects of culture and society – her ability to make the intricacies of the highway traffic system and water infrastructure engaging and enlightening way is astounding. She manages to impose on them a narrative of utter import to the structure of life. Her essay on Hollywood cinema is eye-opening, if I had read it while I was studying film theory at university I’m sure I would have dropped out or changed courses almost immediately. She logically undoes all of the prestige and glamour associated with the art:

Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lecture fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place. A finished picture defies all attempts to analyze what makes it work or not work: the responsibility for its every frame is clouded not only in the accidents and compromises of production but in the clauses of its financing.

Didion’s understanding of the uncertainty and vagueness of a rapidly changing socio-cultural world is a timely reflection which offers a stark, though not entirely disheartening, way of looking upon our contemporary era as we too approach the close of a tumultuous decade.

(A brief note: I do talk about some details which are essential to the plot, so be aware. This is your official spoiler warning.)

Before beginning to read All the King’s Men, I was under the impression – one of those pesky groundless preconceived notions that so often prove to be wildly incorrect – that it would be a very dry, heavily political novel. Had I done a little research beforehand, I would have discovered that Robert Penn Warren not only won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel, but also for his poetry, making him the only person to win the Pulitzer for fiction and poetry. (He was also a Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress.) Enough about the author, basically I approached  All the King’s Men with a misconception about the content and style, and was surprised, even pleased, to find that I was completely wrong.

Jack Burden, a wisecracking journalist, narrates the tale of and his role in the political career of Willie Stark, an idealistic and determined lawyer turned politician, in the early 1930s in the American South. Stark enters his political career primarily because of the corruption of others – an underhanded affair with a local schoolhouse goes fatally wrong which puts him in favour of the voters, he is the pawn in a political game to try and split the vote of another candidate running for Governor. It is this latter event, and the revelation of his role as a pawn, “a sap”, from his assistant/mistress Sadie Burke that sets in motion Stark’s attitude toward politics. Afterward, Stark is not afraid to use the same corrupt, morally questionable techniques in order to succeed. Eventually, he turns to use these on Jack Burden, his press man, who has close familial connections to influential people in the state. Interestingly, Warren presents these events non-chronologically, as Burden reflects back on their relationship together. It is a bit confusing at first, especially because the chapters are so long and it is easy to get lost in the temporal shifts. However, it is a clever stylistic technique, and comes to echo the theme of time, responsibility and retrospective reassessments of the past.

“Yeah,” I said, “I heard the speech. But they don’t give a damn about that. Hell, make ‘em cry, make ‘em laugh, make ‘em think you’re their weak erring pal, or make ‘em think you’re God Almighty. Or make ‘em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir ‘em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ‘em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ‘em, and haven’t been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won’t set on their stomachs, and they don’t believe in God, so it’s up to you to give ‘em something to stir ‘em up and make ‘em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That’s what they come for. Tell ‘em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake, don’t try to improve their minds.”

It is Willie Stark’s insistence that Burden scrounge around for any dirt on Judge Irwin, a prominent father figure of Jack’s youth and an ally to Stark’s political rival MacMurfee, that the story really springs from. Burden revisits his childhood and adolescence, the people and family members that populated those years and uncovers a hell of a lot more than he ever intended. While it is somewhat questionable, I thought, of Stark to encourage Burden to look into Judge Irwin’s past to find any misdeeds, Burden takes on the role with aplomb. A former student of history, Jack has a keen awareness of the importance of the past, but no real attachment to his own. Burden discovers an incident of bribery and suicide which implicates not only Judge Irwin, but Governor Stanton, the father of Burden’s close friends Anne and Adam Stanton. Unsurprisingly, Stark uses these connections and the knowledge of the event to use Adam and Anne for his own ends as well, making Adam Stanton the head of a new medical centre and taking Anne Stanton, the object of Jack’s affection, for his mistress. To Willie, everything and everyone is a potential political tool.

Feeling betrayed and rejected after finding out about Willie and Anne, Jack heads West, taking a road trip of self discovery, coming out of it with the theory that no one is responsible for anything, instead there is an uncontrollable, involuntary current which guides everything. This seems to be just another way for Burden to diminish his participation when things turn out badly. Burden confronts Judge Irwin about his involvement in the bribery/suicide case, leading to Irwin shooting himself later that night. Jack’s mother reveals that Judge Irwin was Jack’s biological father. Despite the violence that occurs as a result of his actions, Burden takes or seems to show little responsibility toward his part in it, assuaging any guilt by lying about their conversation.

I dismissed the question finally. Perhaps the only answer, I thought then, was that by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it is too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made? At least that was the way I argued the case back then.

The novel ends in a display of bloodshed, Adam discovers the truth about Willie and Anne disrupting his staunchly held belief in the triumph of good and honesty over all else, and shoots Willie; Willie’s over protective driver Sugar Boy shoots Adam. As Jack tries to uncover who set in motion the carnage he comes to accept his responsibility, in part, for what happened. While he shows some awareness of how his actions influenced the actions of others, there still doesn’t seem to be any retribution or repentance for this. He ends with everything he ever wanted, money, the girl, the time to write his monograph on a distant family member and so on. At first, this ending didn’t really have much effect on me, but the night I finished it I woke up during the night and found myself thinking about it, incredibly incensed about how things transpired. Thinking further, it probably just reflects deeper on a comment Willie makes in the novel about how all good is built upon the foundation of corruption.

All the King’s Men is a powerful novel, definitely not the dry political tome I was expecting. Instead it examines the moral responsibility we should take for our actions and the implications and importance of time and hindsight in a detailed and vivid language.